


Noise Complaint

by persepoline



Series: wickfic [2]
Category: John Wick (Movies)
Genre: Awkward Crush, Developing Friendships, Gen, Multi, Pre-Canon, Prequel, john wick is happily married and does goofy stuff with his very alive wife
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-01
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:14:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23432977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/persepoline/pseuds/persepoline
Summary: Retired super-assassin John Wick faces his greatest enemy to date: the Homeowners' Association
Relationships: Helen Wick/John Wick, Jimmy & John Wick
Series: wickfic [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1685542
Comments: 28
Kudos: 83





	Noise Complaint

**Author's Note:**

> i haven't bothered to read the comics and the movies don't give us any substantial lore about helen so i made some up

Jimmy’s standing on the threshold of a house that belongs to possibly the world’s deadliest man, holding a tray of freshly-baked lemon bars and wondering whether he should have brought an umbrella.

The house itself is a special kind of hypermodern nightmare - a Frank Lloyd Wrightish ensemble of plexiglass and stainless steel, complete with the jutting pillbox hat of a roof. Angular. A house with high cheekbones.

He’s holding the lemon bars and is definitely not thinking about last Sunday evening, when he saw (he’s pretty sure) the man who lives here snap an unwelcome guest’s neck in the driveway. Nope, Jimmy isn’t thinking of that, he’s thinking about the lemon bars and about how the house has no porch awning and about how the lemon bars will get soaked if it rains, a scenario that’s looking more and more likely with each passing minute. Besides, he can’t be sure _what_ he saw. It was dark. And it was far away - from the relative safety of a patrol car parked across the street, in fact.

**. . .**

“Spying on the new couple?” his partner at the precinct had asked. The casual, teasing tone was almost lost over the scratchiness of the car’s blotter radio, but Jimmy knew a jibe when he heard one.

“I’m not _spying_ ,” he’d said around half a cream cheese bagel. “Just. Y’know. Scoping out the scene.”

“If you’re not careful, you’re gonna find yourself scoping out the scene of the sargeant’s foot up your ass. Word is, he’s being paid a tidy sum to keep away from that house.”

Jimmy had dropped the bagel squarely in his lap. “Wait, what?”

The radio crackled with laughter. “ _Come on, Jim,_ I realize you’re a good old-fashioned corn-fed Iowa boy, but this is the coast. This shit happens all the time. Welcome to the tristate!”

_Welcome to the tristate. Corruption comes free in your cereal box! Not to mention,_ Jimmy thought bitterly, _I’m from Illinois._ He’d never been to Iowa in his life.

He gave a weak laugh for the benefit of the man on the other end of the radio, and turned to gaze at the house across the street. It was by far the fanciest one for miles around. Actually, it sort of reminded him of the house from _Parasite_ ; Jimmy pondered the possibility of someone secretly living in the basement, unbeknownst to the house’s owners. The owners in question were a young couple from the city - she, some kind of nonprofit attorney and he, retired.

Retired from _what_ , though? _Just retired_ , the sergeant had told him.

From the driver’s side of the cop car, Jimmy watched the front door of the house swing open and his new neighbor shuffle out in tartan pajama pants. He padded down the driveway, barefoot, to the mailbox. A strip of toned muscle peeked out from between his waistband and the hem of his shirt when he stretched.

That man, mused Jimmy, looked _way too young_ to be retired. Just what the hell was he _doing_ in retirement anyway? Surely the average guy was only capable of spending so many hours of the day working out before he was satisfied with his abs and dissatisfied with his life, right?

That was when Jimmy noticed movement: two white guys, both of them huge and hulking, were making their way steadily down the street and headed unmistakably for the house. They had gotten out of an Audi, which wasn’t inherently a bad sign - but they were also wearing matte black turtlenecks, which in Jimmy’s experience meant they were either postmodernist playwrights or hired thugs, and either way it was a very bad sign indeed.

As the turtlenecks made their way toward Jimmy’s intolerably hot new neighbor, Jimmy sat with spilt cream cheese soaking into his trousers and wracked his brain. What was this, a _robbery?_ Sure, it was starting to get dark, but even then, it was a bold move to rob a house after announcing your arrival by directly approaching its primary occupant. Intervening would give away Jimmy’s position in an unmarked car, but now the turtlenecks were brandishing tire irons and it was becoming rapidly clear that simply standing by was not an option.

Jimmy was about to pop the car door open - _cream cheese be damned!_ \- when something unexpected happened: his new and unbelievably shredded neighbor roundhouse kicked the first turtleneck in the solar plexus and kneed the second in the groin.

From the safety of his undercover patrol car, Jimmy heard bones snapping.

It was all over in an instant - so quick, in fact, that Jimmy had had no time to intervene, no time even to exit the vehicle. He could do nothing but watch as the turtlenecks limped back to their Audi.

As the sleek, shark-nosed car sped away, Jimmy winced, imagining what it must be like to hold a steering wheel with broken fingers.

A gentle knock came at his driver’s side window.

“aaArgH!” JImmy nearly jumped out of his skin. His abjectly beautiful neighbor had materialized beside the car as if by magic, and was brandishing two confiscated tire irons, one in each hand.

_Jesus Harold Christ_ . Jimmy rolled down the window. _Did he know I was watching the whole time?_ Was this a threat?

“How, er, how can I help you?”

“Hey,” he’d said, voice gruff and face impassive. “I don’t suppose you need a tire iron? I have...extra.”

**. . .**

And now Jimmy stands on Mr Wick’s doorstep: uniform soggy, lemon bars moist, trousers blessedly free of cream cheese. For now, at least.

He’s about to ring the bell a second time when the door swings open. Standing on the threshold isn’t the doleful-looking man with the chiseled abs, but his wife. She’s pretty in that long-faced, sharp-eyed sort of way, and she holds the door open to indicate that Jimmy ought to come inside and get out of the rain.

“Do you know why we call it a threshold?” she asks, leading him down a long hallway into an open-plan parlour.

“Can’t say I do.”

“It’s because people used to put down thresh in their doorways, so they wouldn’t track mud into the house.”

Jimmy scratches at the back of his neck and wonders if she’ll think him uneducated for not knowing what _thresh_ is.

“And to this day, we still call the area around the doorway the _threshold_ even though we don’t use thresh anymore. Isn’t that neat?”

“It sure is, miss.” His response sounds a little hollow to Jimmy’s own ears, but he really does think it’s neat - he also wishes, just a tiny bit, that he’d thought to bring his gun on this outing.

“Oh, please call me Helen.” Helen turns to flash him a beaming smile. “John!” she calls out into the enormous, vacuous space of the house. “We have a visitor!”

In the blink of an eye, John - _really? Hot Assassin Neighbor is named something as plain and ordinary as John?_ \- has materialized at Jimmy’s elbow. His index finger holds his place in a battered paperback that dangles at his side, and Jimmy can’t help but wonder what sort of reading material he gravitates toward in his spare time.

“We’ve met,” says the absolute beefcake of a man. “I gave him a free tire iron.”

“Oh?” Helen is busy rooting in the cupboards, leaving John and Jimmy to stand at the sparkling, granite-topped kitchen island and make pleasant, meaningful expressions at one another. It’s excruciating.

“Yeah,” says Jimmy; he holds out the plastic-wrapped baking tray, “thanks for that! I, uh, brought you these as a--” _peace offering? bribe?_

_Nonsense. I’m the cop!_ **_They_ ** _should be bribing_ **_me._ ** _If we’re going to do a corruption, we might as well have the decency to do it the right way ‘round._

“--as a gift,” Jimmy finishes uselessly. “Welcome to the neighborhood, Mr and Mrs Wick.”

“Glad to be here,” says John. No lift in his voice or twitch of muscle in his face have changed, but something about the way he says it makes it feel true.

_He really is glad to be here_ , thinks Jimmy. He averts his eyes as John shoves an entire lemon bar into his mouth in one go.

“Tea or coffee?” asks Helen.

Five minutes later, they sit around the coffee table, sipping hot drinks and chatting aimlessly about the weather and the news and anything but the various acts of violence Jimmy has witnessed John commit.

Helen does most of the talking: she works for the ACLU and has a great deal to say about it. Most of it goes over Jimmy’s head, but he’s happy to be included in the conversation. John pipes in now and again with funny anecdotes or questions about Helen’s cases, but mostly he watches and listens, one arm draped loosely around his wife’s shoulders.

Helen asks Jimmy about his work and his life and their quiet little suburb. She asks and, surprisingly, he feels compelled to answer - Helen has that sort of effect, it seems. The fine lines around her mouth and at the corners of her eyes are from smiling, and when she asks Jimmy a question he feels that she truly wants to know the answer. He sees why she’s a successful lawyer, he tells her, and Helen laughs.

“Why, thank you.” She leans back into the couch opposite him. “But it’s all thanks to John that I can do the work I do.”

“That’s not true!” John chides reflexively, but he drops it: a telltale sign of an argument so old it isn’t really an argument anymore.

As it turns out, the house is paid for in its entirety by her husband, whose money keeps the two of them afloat - _extremely afloat_ \- so that Helen is free to offer legal counsel to clientele who otherwise would never be able to afford her services.

_But where does the money come from? Military pension? Inheritance from wealthy relatives?_ It would be rude to ask, so Jimmy doesn’t. 

Instead, he tells the Wicks about his hometown back in the midwest, tells them how it differs from this place, even manages to tell a funny story or two about transitioning from his old precinct to his new one. Helen asks for recommendations of local restaurants. John asks about the wildlife in the area.

By the time Jimmy stands and stretches, several hours have passed and the lemon bars have vanished entirely.

“Oh,” says Helen Wick, “before you go, there’s one thing I’ve been meaning to ask about.”

Jimmy is, by this point, feeling more than a little overwhelmed. He’s pretty sure that in the span of less than a day, he has fallen madly in love with both his silent, shredded new neighbor and his charming, quick-witted wife. That, or Jimmy’s simply had too much caffeine. The effect is much the same.

“Hm?” he says, because it’s about all he can manage right now.

“Yes,” says Helen, “you see, we’ve had some trouble.”

Jimmy frowns. “What kind of trouble?”

He thinks of the matte black turtlenecks and their streamlined Audi.

John has left the room and Jimmy can hear, from far down the hallway, the soft clinking noises of a dishwasher being loaded with used coffee mugs. When he looks at Mrs Wick, her expression is...perturbed. As though she’s holding back her anxiety.

“Mhm,” she says. “I’m afraid there are people who don’t want us here. They’ve been making some rather _pointed_ overtures and,” she rests her chin on her hand, wedding ring winking in the light, “I confess, I’m starting to get a little spooked.”

Jimmy, feeling the gravity of the situation, takes his seat once again and faces Helen across the coffee table. This is his job - to protect the people in his community. Even if they’re shady ex-criminals who live in houses that look like the headquarters of some comicbook supervillain syndicate.

“Ma’am,” he says, “may I speak candidly?”

Frankness is the best way to go in these circumstances.

“If it’s the mafia who’re after you, I can’t guarantee that a small local police force will have the resources to protect you. Typically, I’d recommend that you enter a witness protection program or at least hire private security, but…” Jimmy trails off, his head turning unconsciously in John’s direction. He sighs, “between you and me, I suspect your husband may have that covered.”

Helen Wick blinks. Then she laughs aloud.

“Oh no, no, you misunderstand me.” She can barely get the words out, she’s laughing so hard. “You’re right, John can handle organized crime. What John cannot handle, I fear, is the Homeowners’ Association.”

**. . .**

One in five Americans live in a planned subdivision, which, as far as Jimmy’s concerned, means that one in five Americans run a chance of being insufferable.

The Wicks’ house is not in a planned subdivision, but the land their house stands upon is managed by the same developer that maintains the grounds, utilities, and insurance for a number of condominiums and single-family townhouses in the neighborhood - which means that John, when he’d purchased the property, had inadvertently signed up to serve in a war waged almost exclusively by middle-aged white moms named Candace.

The declaration of war comes in the form of a letter, delivered not a week after the Wicks first move in. The letter in question is worded so politely it burns. John tosses it in the trash without a second thought.

The second letter appears in the mailbox only days later. It makes some scathing requests about the height of the lawn and the viscosity of the shrubs. It’s worded like the list of ingredients on the back of a Clorox bottle. The third letter is so caustic that it leaves chemical burns on Jimmy’s ears when Helen reads it to him over the phone the following week. Helen won’t let him see the fourth letter; she claims it’ll vaporize him.

“What’s their problem?” asks Jimmy. “I mean, _viscosity of the shrubs?_ What the hell is that? How do you measure that? Who the hell even says _shrubs_ nowadays. They’re called bushes.”

Helen sighs into the receiver. “First it was the height of the lawn, then it was the way the trees are trimmed...the house looks _immaculate_ , Jim. I can’t see what’s wrong with it.”

It’s not long before people are calling the precinct to leave anonymous noise complaints, forcing Jimmy to turn up on the Wicks’ doorstep at all hours of the night. He’s apologetic, and Helen’s apologetic, and John’s apologetic, and then they have to repeat the whole sorry affair a couple days later. It’s enough to drive even the most well-mannered neighbors to madness.

To make matters all the more infuriating, every time Jimmy arrives, groggy and sleep-deprived, at the Wicks’ home at 3:00 AM, _there’s never any noise to complain of_. No blaring rock n’ roll, no domestic disputes, nothing but crickets chirping.

Occasionally, there’s another Audi or two parked down the street. Occasionally, there’s the sound of a gunshot. Occasionally, there’s a spot of blood on the doormat or (on one alarming evening) what looks like a severed human finger lying in the grass beside the curb.

But every time Jimmy asks if they need assistance, the Wicks smile and shake their heads, _no, thank you, everything is fine, things are good but it’s terribly late and they’re so sorry that Jimmy’s gone to the trouble of coming out to check on them, he must be so tired, would he like to come in for some tea, it’s the least they can do--_

Jimmy declines. Always, he declines.

Having someone - _two_ someones - two _hot_ someones - asking after his health and taking an interest in his wellbeing is a foreign kindness, overwhelming, embarrassing even.

It occurs to him that it’s not exactly normal for people to invite cops into their homes in the middle of the night. It occurs to him that maybe - just maybe - he’s being invited into something _else_ , something more than your average neighborly friendship. It’s not an invitation Jimmy knows how to accept.

**. . .**

When he asks a couple prying questions, Helen reveals that not all of the noise complaints are unfounded acts of petty harassment from jealous homeowners. Jimmy suspected as much, figured the severed human finger had to have come from somebody. Probably somebody in a matte black turtleneck, somebody from the city, from John’s other life, his old one.

The turtlenecks and the homeowners’ association are in no way connected, and yet they seem to have accidentally convened in order to make the Wicks’ lives more difficult.

At least, this is what Helen tells Jimmy over pizza a couple weeks later. They’re in a little mom n’ pop joint, a hole in the wall sort of place that does Chicago-style deep-dish just the way Jimmy likes it.

“This is not a pizza,” says Helen, scandalized. “This is a swimming pool.”

“Exactly. That’s the whole point.”

He’s pleasantly surprised that John is so cool with letting his wife hang out with other men. In Jimmy’s experience, guys like John - guys with martial arts training, guys who hit the gym several times a week, guys with fancy cars and fancier cologne - tend to get a little too possessive for comfort, but...all things considered, John is remarkably chill. In the little time he’s spent in the Wicks’ company, Jimmy’s even overheard John encouraging Helen to go out to lunch with him. Obviously it’s nothing that deserves congratulations; after all, it’s no more than the bare minimum of healthy, normal, non-obsessive behavior between spouses. But it’s also a refreshing departure from the macho rhetoric that Jimmy grew up around - that most guys his age grew up around.

Today, Helen’s wearing a tailored suit. The padded shoulders remind him of the lady FBI agent from the _X Files_ , the ginger. _What was her name again?_

Surely, Helen could make it as an FBI agent. _Nerves of steel_ , Jimmy thinks as he watches her pull a new letter from her purse. She lays it out across the diner tabletop and smoothes the creases, the lacquer of her manicure catching the light.

“Another one?”

Helen nods. “Came in the mail this morning.”

Jimmy scans the letter.

“They’re asking you to,” he squints, “trim your crabgrass to within one quarter of a millimeter of the approved lawn height as stipulated in the bylaws.”

“One quarter of a millimeter!” Helen throws up her hands. “That’s 0.00984252nds of an inch--”

“Whoa.” Jimmy blinks, “Pardon me, but how the hell did you do that just now?”

Helen barrels on ahead as if she didn’t hear him. “I can’t _measure_ that, Jim, _nobody_ can measure that!”

Jimmy scratches his head and nods to the waiter for more coffee. He’d order a round of shots for both of them if he could, but unfortunately tequila doesn’t pair so well with deep-dish pizza...and besides, it’s not on the menu.

He fingers the strange creases on the letter. In the corner sits the telltale stamp of the community H.O.A. Several lines run from the top corners of the paper down to meet at a central point in the middle of the bottom of the page.

“What _happened_ to this?”

Helen dabs at her mouth with a napkin. “John folded it. Into a paper airplane.” A smile tugs at the side of her mouth. “I had to fish it out of the trash.”

**. . .**

Jimmy’s encounters with John Wick himself are rare, cryptic, and charmingly brusque. There’s the time John volunteers to help him build a shed after Jimmy mentions offhandedly that it’s a big job for one person. There’s the time he catches John putting out bowls of food for the occasional stray cat or dog that roams the neighborhood. There’s the time John tries to order five pink plastic yard flamingos but accidentally orders fifty, and spends the next couple weeks trying ( _desperately, Jimmy suspects_ ) to pawn them off on people.

The turtlenecks continue to visit. Sometimes, they leave dejectedly with fifteen pink plastic yard flamingos. Sometimes they leave with blunt force trauma. Sometimes they don’t leave at all.

On one memorable occasion, Jimmy pulls into the driveway just in time to watch a surly man advance on John, carrying an automatic with what looks like some sort of homebrew silencer. In a fraction of a second, the man is on the ground, dead as a doornail.

“John,” says Jimmy.

“Jimmy,” says John.

The cop regards the corpse at his feet. He regards John.

“It’s broad daylight,” he says.

John stares impassively. Then he cranes his neck slowly upward to stare unblinking into the afternoon expanse of blue.

He looks back at Jimmy. “So it is,” he says.

“Okay,” says Jimmy. “Cool. Just letting you know. That it’s, uh. That it’s broad daylight. Right now.”

John bends to fish a cell phone from the dead man’s hand. It’s a Nokia clamshell flip-phone, an obvious burner. It must be unlocked, because John flicks it open and briskly dials a number without so much as looking one up. After dialing, he takes each half of the phone in a hand and snaps the cell in two, turning on his heel to chuck its remains into the distance. Jimmy hears what was formerly the phone _crunch_ its way deep into a pile of dry leaves on the edge of the property.

When John turns back to him, he looks almost surprised to find the cop still standing there - as though he expected him to dissolve right there on the tarmac, to cease existing when no longer in view.

“Thanks,” he says, “for letting me know.”

“Huh?”

“About the…” his face turns upwards again, “...daylight.”

“No problem.”

By the time the cleaners arrive to dispose of the body, Jimmy has made himself scarce.

He is beginning to realize that when you don’t _know_ John, his consistent, quiet stoicism comes off as intimidating. When you _do_ know him, that quiet stoicism feels...endearing? As Jimmy becomes more closely acquainted with the Wicks - as they draw him deeper into their confidence and their friendship - he comes to see that John’s demeanor masks a fierce devotion to the people he loves, a devotion almost childlike in its intensity.

One day he runs into John at the local gymnasium. The Wicks have their own private gym in that ridiculous Frank Lloyd Wright house of theirs, but John has, at Helen’s encouragement, taken up membership at the municipal gym in an effort to (as Helen has put it to Jimmy over a glass of wine) “engage with the community.”

There’s a small audience gathered in one corner of the weight room, where John is going to town on a punching bag suspended from the ceiling. As Jimmy inches closer, he sees that the gym is going to need to purchase a new punching bag soon. This one doesn’t stand a chance. John is pulverizing it.

“That’s the guy right?” Jimmy overhears two nearby onlookers talking in hushed, awed tones. “Just moved here a couple months back?”

“That’s the guy.”

“I heard he’s ex-CIA.”

“Nah, he was a Marine.”

Another musclehead joins the conversation. “That can’t be right. I heard he used to be a mafia hitman.”

“I heard he killed a man with nothing but a plastic yard flamingo. _A fucking yard flamingo.”_

Over by the punching bag, John is still going at it. Jimmy winces involuntarily. He hopes the punching bag has a last will and testament written.

“Hey man, what gives!” shouts one of the guys watching.

“My wife’s away on a business trip,” says John in between punches, breath coming heavy. “I really miss her.”

**. . .**

At a glance, Helen is everything John isn’t: cheerful where he is solemn, outgoing where he is reserved, olive-skinned where he is pale, lean and willowy where he is - for want of more tactful phrasing - _totally jacked_.

At a glance, Helen is John’s reverse, his mirror image. But as Jimmy gets to know them, over the course of cookouts and fundraising auctions and leisurely evening get-togethers spent drinking on the porch, he begins to see that there is no clear line demarcating where Helen ends and John begins, or vice-versa. Helen is as much John as John is Helen. It’s a classic case of codependency in its subtlest form.

The turtlenecks stop visiting. The months trickle into a year, maybe longer.

The Wicks like to keep their distance. They aren’t above a backyard barbecue, but they aren’t exactly Neighborhood Watch kind of people, or book club kind of people, or Parent/Teacher Association kind of people - though, granted, Jimmy shudders to think of the damage the iron-fisted power couple might do to a PTA meeting. The thought of John Wick using his finely-honed intimidation skills to question a recalcitrant teacher about his son’s grades or his daughter’s science fair project makes Jimmy chuckle.

But no, the Wicks never talk of children. A great deal of their time is spent out-of-town entirely, in the big city: Helen likes museums, and John likes what Helen likes. Occasionally they’ll make an appearance at a local theater production, an antique sale, a genteel open-air benefit concert of some kind. But always, they are holding the community at arm’s length.

The turtlenecks stop visiting. The Homeowners’ Association is a different story.

The letters keep coming; gradually they increase from one per week to two, then three, then five. One year after moving in and the Wicks are quite literally drowning in strongly-worded letters.

“What’re they thinking?” Jimmy muses one afternoon, “That they’re going to _mail you to death?”_

He’s seated at the Wicks’ dining room table, pouring over the latest letter with Helen. John is baking bread and whistling, which Jimmy has come to recognize are John’s least violent coping mechanisms.

“Our security cameras picked up someone snooping around the house’s perimeter last night,” says Helen. “It’s that woman from the board again.”

“Legally-speaking, they can’t really do anything to enforce their rules.” Jimmy shrugs. “Other than fine you.”

The Wicks have enough money to pay off the entire suburb if they needed to. If something’s bothering Helen, it’s not the fines.

“It’s just the...boldness of it all,” says Helen, when pressed. “It’s the--” she waves a hand noncommittally.

“The audacity?” John fills in.

“Yes, precisely! Thank you, dear.”

He leans down to kiss her, leaving a little trail of baking flour on her navy blouse, and Jimmy has the decency to look away.

“I think,” she says, “it’s time we paid a visit to the Homeowners’ Association.”

**. . .**

The H.O.A. in question is run by a petite blonde sporting a tennis skirt and the _Can I Speak To The Manager_ haircut. Jimmy knows this because he is currently seated in the first ever Homeowners’ Association meeting of his life, amid a sea of petite blondes named Karen or Kimberly or Cynthia.

It’s a small conference room in the town country club, and today it’s packed with citizens eager to witness the final boss fight between the H.O.A. and their mortal enemies, John and Helen Wick. Jimmy wishes he’d had the foresight to bring popcorn or a soda pop with him - but he’ll settle for the tiny crustless cucumber sandwiches laid out on a faux silver platter by the door.

“Attention,” says the petite blonde who, Jimmy guesses, is running this whole circus. She stands behind a podium at the front of the room. “May I have your attention?”

The hubbub dissipates.

“Thank you.” The petite blonde smiles and clears her throat. “We are gathered here today to discuss the grievances this council has lodged, formally and informally, against homeowners Wick and Wick.”

_What is this, a trial?_

“First of all,” the petite blonde continues, “the placement of the flower boxes alongside the driveway is against regulation.” She smiles wider this time; it’s like a Norman Rockwell painting gone horribly wrong. “They ought to be placed at a width of four feet apart, and instead appear to be placed three and a half feet apart.” She looks to the Wicks, who are seated in the front row. “Do you have any plans to move your flower boxes?”

“No,” says John.

The petite blonde frowns. “Well, uh. Secondly, the variety of flowers growing in the boxes is likewise against regulation. They appear to be _petunia axillaris_ , but only _petunia exserta_ or _petunia integrifolia_ are allowed to be cultivated, according to the bylaws. Do you have any plans to change your flowerbed rotation?”

“No,” says John.

Behind Jimmy, people are beginning to whisper to each other.

Since she has no gavel, the petite blonde knocks her fist against the podium to quiet the growing murmur. “Do you have anything to say for yourselves?”

Mrs Helen Wick shuffles up to the podium and taps the microphone. She leans gently forward to say, “Keep talking shit from your Honda, Karen.”

Karen drops instantaneously to the floor.

The crowd gasps.

One of the identical blondes rushes over to kneel beside her, holding quivering fingers to the side of her neck to check Karen’s pulse.

“Why, she’s dead!” cried the blonde woman. “Dead as a doornail!”

Karen was overcome by the sheer weight of that sick burn. John and Helen Wick emerge victorious from their battle with the Homeowners’ Association.

**Author's Note:**

> doing research about HOAs was fucking excruciating.
> 
> anyway, i didn't really feel like finishing this properly but if you made it this far, thanks for reading! i stole the punching bag scene from that one tumblr post. i can't find it but you know the one. if this fic brought you joy, please consider [tossing me 50 cents on ko-fi](https://ko-fi.com/swordfright) if you're so inclined.
> 
> oh! and “keep talking that shit from your honda” is perhaps my favorite line of all time. it ought to be rightly credited to genius lyricist Megan Thee Stallion


End file.
